Having open source drivers for these peripherals is extremely important...

I have several printers and scanners which came with official drivers for windows and macos, these drivers were 32bit and powerpc respectively, they don't work anymore on modern versions. Modern Linux distros however support these devices out of the box, even on 64bit or ARM.

I used to use an Alpha workstation for my desktop and open source drivers for all kinds of hardware which never officially supported the alpha would run just fine.

Nowadays when i buy peripherals i check for open source drivers before i make the purchase, or i look for devices which support open standards and don't need custom drivers (eg postscript when it comes to printers).

I have some old printers which support postscript, either via ethernet to parallel adapters or via their built in 10baseT ethernet controllers. Virtually anything will happily print to these printers despite their age. I can also print to any modern postscript printer using an ancient os if necessary.